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Planet of Slums

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Planet of Slums

By: Mike Davis
Narrated by: Mike Lenz
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About this listen

The classic, brilliant, best-selling account of the rise of the world's slums, where, according to the United Nations, one billion people now live.

From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory.

Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz. Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the "war on terrorism" as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor.

©2006 Mike Davis (P)2020 Tantor
Economics Politics & Government Sociology Urban Capitalism Socialism Africa Social justice Economic disparity Iran Latin American Middle East War Urban Nonfiction
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The topic is very interesting but couldn’t handle the narration - felt as if I were listening to a robot.

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